Saturday, November 18, 2017

Social Class Prejudice in Nigerian Teacher Competency Tests

The results of the teacher competency test in Kaduna
State—and in several Nigerian states in previous years—give literal materiality
to Oscar Wilde’s satiric epigram about how “everybody who is incapable of
learning has taken to teaching.”

The samples Kaduna State governor Nasiru El-Rufai made
public on social media may be unrepresentative. They probably merely serve to
hyperbolize the egregiousness of the teachers’ incompetence and to win the
governor public support.

But I cannot in good
conscience defend the continued employment of teachers I would never allow to
teach even my enemies’ kids, much less my own kids. That’s my own irreducibly minimum
personal morality test on the issue.

But it’s also true that the sacking of the incompetent
teachers merely scratches the surface of a problem that is considerably high
and deep. For one, the remuneration for primary school teachers is now among
the worst in the country. When my dad was a primary school Arabic and Islamic
Studies teacher in the 1970s and 1980s, his salary was sufficient to sustain a
fairly comfortable lower middle-class lifestyle for us. He was even able to
save enough to start building a 4-bedroom house until Buhari and Idiagbon
struck in 1983, and things went downhill from there.

Today, public primary school teachers aren’t just poorly
paid; they are usually owed salaries for months on end. As the English saying
goes, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. I’d add that if you pay nothing, you
get nothing. As I pointed out in my
August 6, 2016 column titled “Nigeria as a Perverse Anarchist Paradise,” “When
I grew up in Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s, private primary schools were few
and far between, and the existing ones at the time had a need to boldly
inscribe on their signposts that they were ‘government approved’ to legitimize
their existence. Even so, private primary schools were almost completely absent
in rural Nigeria.

“During my last visit to Nigeria, the only primary schools
that were in session in the whole of Kwara State (and this is true of most
other states) were private primary schools. Government primary schools were
closed because teachers were on strike to protest months of unpaid salaries.
Several people told me even if teachers weren’t on strike people with even a
little means have learned to not send their children to government primary
schools because government schools have become the graveyards of learning and creativity.”

So if El-Rufai won’t increase teacher pay, his reform would
be mere superficial window-dressing because the half-wits he is weeding out now
will most definitely be replaced by people who won’t be different from them. He
would have my full support if he were to say, “I will triple teacher pay and
insist that only the most qualified are recruited.”

Of course, this should be replicated at all levels of
education—and even beyond—for it to be meaningful. Limiting it to only primary
school teachers would not just be callous grandstanding; it would be
exhibitionistic trampling on the weak and the helpless.

For starters, if the governor is sincere, the people who set
and graded the competency exams should also be fired. They, too, have no
business being judges of anyone’s competence. From inexcusably poor grammar, to
inept and fuzzily worded questions, to questionable grading (for example, a
teacher lost points for not prefixing “Malam” to El-Rufai’s name!), they are
nearly as incompetent as the people they are causing to (justifiably) lose
their jobs.

And I can bet my boots that if a governance competency test
were conducted for Nigeria’s leaders—from the very top to the bottom—most of
them would fail, but their fiercest defenders would be the very people they
routinely oppress and dehumanize. It’s the same twisted mentality that explains
why poor, petty thieves are burned alive by other poor people but wealthy
politicians who feed off the misery of the poor are celebrated and defended by
the poor.

As someone whose intellectual and ideological temperaments
are irrevocably and unapologetically pro-poor, I hate for people to lose their
jobs, but you can’t have uneducated and uneducable adults "educating"
poor people’s children and thereby ensuring an invidious intergenerational
perpetuation of a vicious cycle of poverty.

Education is the greatest social leveler. There are very few
Nigerians who come from moneyed or aristocratic dynasties. Access to decent basic public education was
the propeller for many people’s social rise. That access is now being denied to
the children of the poor. They are condemned to be taught by “teachers” who are
incapable of learning or who are too poorly paid to bother with teaching, in
schools that aren’t even fit for animals, and under the watch of political
leaders who don’t spare a thought for decent public education because their own
children are either abroad or in the best Nigerian private schools.

That means the
children of the poor can’t escape the poverty trap that many of us children of
poor parents escaped through access to decent public education.

In a bizarre way, nonetheless, several (certainly not all)
of the people who celebrate the competency tests for primary school teachers
and those who condemn them are unified by a common contempt for the poor:
several who celebrate the tests do so only because the tests target a weak,
poor segment of the society, and those who decry them do so because they’re not
personally affected by the poor quality of teachers at public primary schools
since their own kids are either abroad or in private primary schools.

But overhauling public primary school education through
incentivizing teaching and then recruiting the best is crucial to securing our
future. I hope that is Governor El-Rufai’s ultimate goal.

Fake Lai Mohammed
Quote on Nigerian Social Media

When fake, satiric quotes attributed to you are
indistinguishable from your real, everyday utterances, you know you’re the very
proverb for untruthfulness. A quote trending on Nigerian WhatsApp groups— and
that is now spilling over to Facebook and Twitter—credits Information Minister
Lai Mohammed with having said, "PMB's government has spent almost N2
trillion on infrastructural projects. But you can't see it because of the huge
size of these projects."

It would have been insanely rib-tickling if it were true,
but Lai Mohammed actually never said that. Search the sentence on Google and
you won’t find a record of it anywhere. The meme suspiciously never mentions
when and where Lai allegedly made the statement. That was a dead giveaway for
me. But I honestly don’t blame people who were suckered into believing its
authenticity. I, too, was almost had, and it’s precisely because Lai had told
fibs in the past that compete with that quote in incredulity.

A transparently compulsive liar who perpetually says he has
never lied in his life (a claim even saints can’t and won’t make), who
barefacedly tells the basest, most audacious lies without the slightest pang of
compunction, and who has come to embody mendacity at its vilest is capable of
telling any kind of lie. I think that’s why people are primed to believe the
worst of Lai Mohammed.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.